A short post which might save you an hour or so banging your head against your computer screen.

I’ve been setting up another site using indexhibit for a CMS – it’s a pretty standard installation, using PHP, Apache2 and MySQL. Database creation is identical to WordPress and setting up the system is simple – however once everything appeared to be working, I hit a really really frustrating and fundamentally crippling problem.

The Problem: Unable to upload pictures to exhibits

Pictures upload to the server, but the CMS does not ‘see’ them – you don’t get thumbnails, you don’t get the option to upload more images, you can’t use them in your exhibit. Basically, this renders the whole site useless.

The Solution:

Install GD. GD is a PHP extension which is used to process uploaded images – you can read more here, should you so desire.

To install, type the following at the command prompt:

$ sudo apt-get install php5-gd

Usual apt installation process will occur ( After this operation, 602kB of additional disk space will be used.Do you want to continue [Y/n]? ), and after that you can restart Apache – it will reload the config files as part of the install, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.

Update on installing Ubuntu on the PowerBook. I’ve gone back and installed Ubuntu 9.04, and the system seems to be working pretty decently.

Still not working:

Sleep (won’t work on any Linux install on this machine)

Brightness controls

There is a daemon for controlling brightness etc…, but I’m not considering it a major fail. It does shorten the battery, not being able to dim the screen, however the brightness does change according to whether the machine is plugged into the mains or not so the facility is definitely lurking there somewhere.

The good:

Wireless is working perfectly. I’m using the fwcutter (bcm43xx) tool to flash the WLAN fw to function under Linux. After this adjustment, Ubuntu actually volunteered an available driver, which was easy to install and seems to work perfectly, with none of the dropouts I experienced on Fedora 12. (On a side note, the Airport card still works perfectly in Mac OS X after the firmware modification)

Sound works ‘out of the box’, again a distinct improvement on Fedora.

Hotkeys for volume up/down & DVD eject work out-of-box

I struggled to (easily) install Java on this machine because of the architecture. However, there are really good open source Java dev tools available from OpenJDK. The openJDK package is in the default apt repositories, so I was able to install using:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

for the runtime environment and dev kit respectively.

The main frustration with this platform is the lack of Dropbox support – I’m planning to try and compile dropboxd from source and get it running on this machine soon. But for now, the system is working acceptably for a bit of Java development work.